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Sunday, August 30, 2015

Weekly Faith Perfecting Experience

We had Stake Conference yesterday so all of Okinawa came
here and I saw Tagawa Kaicho from my first area Ishigaki! He recognized me
straight away and gave me a hug and said my Japanese was good, which he used to
tell me all the time when I could never understand anything he said, as a
bean-chan. I had the opportunity to translate the meeting for Sister Egan, the
Mission President's wife, and I spent a solid amount of time thoroughly
apologizing for how terrible it was. Translating from English to Japanese is no
problem, I can understand English well enough that even if I can't translate
word-for-word I can understand the meaning or the feeling and then use simple
Japanese, but when I'm hearing complicated Japanese and then trying to figure
out how to say that in normal English I end up missing the next few sentences,
and on goes the downwards spiral to embarrassment and a humbling reminder that
I need to improve my language skills.

There was a couple from Naha (south city in Okinawa) who's
daughter is serving in Brisbane. Their daughter met my girlfriend's grandmother
- the couple called me a few days earlier asking if I'd be at conference and so
when we met up we took a photo together. Interesting connection!

Mission President also paid us a visit during dinner
yesterday and we're glad that we spent some time cleaning the morning before,
but we cleaned the floor too nicely, and it's super slippery. Someone made the
joke that when President came in it almost looked like we were going to be in
need of a new President, but he managed to grab on to the chair before he
slipped completely over.

This week was hard for a number of reasons, one was the lack
of fruits from our efforts. What I mean by that is that we found so many people
that would let us come back but when we followed up with them they were either
not home or if it were over the phone they said they were busy, many didn't
even pick up. For example we had 5 lessons scheduled one day and they all fell
through.

Through this I remembered something my last companion Elder
Richards taught us just before he finished his mission - about faith promoting
experiences and faith perfecting experiences. All those times we would walk
away from a contact feeling the Spirit, feeling joy & excitement, with a
return appointment, or just after we had given someone a Book of Mormon or
invited them to be baptised, promoted our faith and reminded us of what can
come from hard work. Then, this week, when it looked like nothing happened,
when we, instead of teaching 5 lessons, knocked on doors all day, had a faith
perfecting experience because though we didn't see the fruits of our work, we
got out there, we worked hard, we looked for the Spirit in everything, and we
continued doing the work of the Lord because we love Him and know this is
right. And that is one of the greatest reasons why I'm out here, because I love
the Lord (John 14:15, my favourite scripture from Seminary) and want to be here
doing this work with Him.